Vintage Snapshots of Swedish Midsummer looking suspiciously like a Spooky Cult

While the annual holiday of Midsummer typically brings to mind flower crowns and smorgasbords of perfectly-arranged picnic food, we’ve dug up some archive photographs from the Midsummers of yore, where the grainy black & white filters and old fashioned 19th century dress suddenly bring a distinctly more ‘culty’ vibe to the whole affair…. The ancient holiday is deeply rooted…

The Last Great California Hippie Commune is still going Strong

They came from the mountains, and kept to themselves. If you were lucky, you might have seen them frolicking in the hills under the glow of the buttery, golden hour sunshine that California does so well. Collectively, they were known as “The Brotherhood of the Sun,” and in the 1970s, they emerged as one of…

America’s Last Snake-handling Cults

I wandered into the weird part of the internet again this morning, through the doors of a snake-handling church in the Appalachian mountains of West Virginia, to be specific. I stumbled upon a peculiar documentary from 1977, an in-depth portrait of a snake cult that exists still to this day, in a tiny unincorporated community…

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Greetings from Rabbi Shaul’s Sacred Taxidermy Museum, Brooklyn, NY

It’s a day like any other in Borough Park, Brooklyn. Yiddish-painted school buses go to-and-fro, and women tighten the tichels around their heads; every man is silhouetted by a pair of perfectly curled sideburns, and the local grocer has a two-for-one deal on blintzes. Tel-Aviv notwithstanding, the Big Apple is home to our planet’s largest Hasidic…

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On a Remote Volcanic Island, American Soldiers Are Worshipped like Gods

Forget Valentine’s Day– let’s talk about John Frum Day. At this very moment, on a tiny island in the South Pacific, natives are preparing their annual rituals to welcome a mysterious messiah, expected to return on February 15th. In this remote corner of the world, every year the islanders await the return of a World…

The Most Exclusive US College that You’ve Probably Never Heard Of

What if I told you there was an elite college as exclusive as Harvard and as remote as the North Pole? That it consistently tops Harvard’s yield rate and evades suspicions of being a cult, that it requires its students to engage in 20 hours of manual labor per week and doesn’t let them leave…

So What’s the Deal with Those Quakertown Pyramids?

We just love it when two utterly opposite worlds collide, which is precisely the case with the mysterious pyramids sitting smack in the middle of Quakertown, USA. That’s right, States-bound folks: you can now eschew a visit to Cairo and just head to rural Pennsylvania to get a taste of an esoteric society, the “Rosicrucian Order”,…

And the Award for Most Fashionable UFO Cult Goes to…

Ruth Norman, hands down. The gilded leader of “Unarius,” a UFO cult founded with her husband Ernest in 1954, Ruth was not only a figurehead for “interdimensional understanding” but a master at putting together looks fit for an intergalactic space queen. So let’s throw on our tiara and refuel our rocket to explore some of…

The Town with a Subculture of Secret Tiny Doors

In Ann Arbor, Michigan, a series of what is known as ‘fairy doors’, began popping up around the area in 2005, built into buildings, shops and restaurants and quickly acquired a cult following. Father and children’s book author, Jonathan B. Wright, believed to be behind the installation of the whimsical tiny portals, is kind of…

The 1994 Scientology Handbook is Just as Crazy as you Imagined it to Be

In the hope of not inviting the wrath of the Scientology tech department with this article (surely they have a team of hackers on sabotage duty somewhere), I’d like to share some fascinating images from the 1994 Scientology handbook that have recently surfaced on the web… The handbook is a massive 871-page hardcover book available to buy on Amazon, featuring over 700 bizarre comic…